Saturday, August 21, 2010

Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat on Acer AspireOne

One caveat before you read any further: my AspireOne is old as hell (9" w/ 8GB SSD) and these problems/fixes may not work on newer models.

Ok, now with that out of the way, I've got some good news: Maverick works great on my AO. Installation was fast and painless (it only took around 20 min., I think), and booting is super-quick (something like 15 seconds to a working desktop in my experience). Wireless works out-of-the-box, as does the wifi activity light :O. Unfortunately, the SD card slots are still b0rked. To get them working, we can use the same fix from my previous AO/Ubuntu post:

Open up a terminal and type:

sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/options

Then paste in:

options sdhci debug_quirks=1

Reboot and you should be all set.

I also ran into a problem trying to create shared directories using samba. The system automatically installs the samba packages just fine, but when I try to actually make a share, it fails with the error "Failed to execute child process "testparm" (No such file or directory)." If this problem affects you, too, hop back into your terminal and type:

This should get you all fixed up. You don't even need to reboot again.

Some other things to note about this new release:1. Virtualbox no longer needs Guest Additions installed to utilize mouse pointer integration.2. The new unity netbook interface sucks. I think the idea of putting the launcher bar on the left is great, and I like the look of it, but I could never track down where they had the gnome-terminal hidden, and it wouldn't show up when I searched for it in their application search applet. Also, hitting Alt+F2 wouldn't bring up the execution prompt, so after a few minutes of frustration, I uninstalled it and went back to the standard interface.

I'm happy to see the improvements they've made in this new release and I look forward to seeing what else comes in before the upcoming feature freeze. If you run into any other problems with this release, drop me a comment and I'll help however I can. Also, keep an eye on my PPA for packages of bsnes v1.0, which should be optimized enough for use on your AspireOne netbook.

I agree about Unity. Could've been nice but it still needs a lot of work. I'm also using an Aspire one but it's the one with the hard drive.

I sort of liked the sidebar on the left but it was just too slow. I'm now using Gnome on it but I deleted the bottom panel and I have the top panel on auto hide. For some reason, the battery applet on Unity doesn't work. -_- The one on Gnome works perfectly fine so I know how long my battery's going to last.

And lastly, thanks for the tips re: SD card slots and samba :) Found your blog because I want to enable the SD card reader.

Hi Clair, glad I could help. I think Unity has a long way to go before I would consider using it full-time, but it sounds like Canonical will be putting a lot of work into it in the future, as it will be the default interface in all releases (desktop, netbook, etc) of Natty Narwhal and onward...

the fix for sd card reader had no effect on my aspire one aoa150, I know its not the same machine but both readers are not showing up when sdcards are inserted and at this stage I am willing to try anything. Thanks anyway, Any idea how I can fix this issue I`m using ubuntu 10.10 2.6.35-28 generic gnome 2.32Atom N270 @1.6ghzMark